{"id":228475,"date":"2026-01-07T02:23:51","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T08:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/researchers-build-plasma-accelerator-that-boosts-electron-energy-and-brightness-at-the-same-time"},"modified":"2026-01-07T02:23:51","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T08:23:51","slug":"researchers-build-plasma-accelerator-that-boosts-electron-energy-and-brightness-at-the-same-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/researchers-build-plasma-accelerator-that-boosts-electron-energy-and-brightness-at-the-same-time","title":{"rendered":"Researchers build plasma accelerator that boosts electron energy and brightness at the same time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researchers-build-plasma-accelerator-that-boosts-electron-energy-and-brightness-at-the-same-time.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers from the Department of Energy\u2019s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), have designed innovative technology that can generate both high-energy and high-brightness electron bunches in an accelerator that is a fraction of the size of current particle accelerators.<\/p>\n<p>This breakthrough has the potential to shrink the size of future particle colliders and X-ray free-electron lasers that researchers use to gain insight into nature\u2019s fundamental building blocks and processes.<\/p>\n<p>In the new study, the UCLA-led team developed a novel <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2023-12-particle-cold-plasma-large-picnic.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">plasma wakefield accelerator<\/a> (PWFA), in which electrons gain energy by \u201csurfing\u201d a plasma wave rather than drawing energy from the electromagnetic field inside metal structures of conventional accelerators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers from the Department of Energy\u2019s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), have designed innovative technology that can generate both high-energy and high-brightness electron bunches in an accelerator that is a fraction of the size of current particle accelerators. This breakthrough has the potential to shrink the size of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1522,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-innovation","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}